Smyllie's Ireland by Caleb Wood Richardson

Smyllie's Ireland by Caleb Wood Richardson

Author:Caleb Wood Richardson [Richardson, Caleb Wood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Ireland, Biography & Memoir, Literary
ISBN: 9780253041265
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2019-04-24T04:00:00+00:00


5

LIBERALS

IN 1950, A MINOR CONFLAGRATION AROSE IN THE correspondence columns of the Irish Times over a speech by Professor Felim Ó Briain, chair of philosophy at University College Galway. Ó Briain had given a talk warning against the “liberal ethic” that he believed was threatening Western civilization. Socialists behind the iron curtain and liberals on this side of it shared a belief in “a free morality—the ethics of free love,” and unless Catholics stood up against it “the only freedom that would triumph . . . [would be] the freedom of the armed man to suppress the liberty of all who differed from his views.”1 Linking contraception to communism, and implying that Protestant clerics supported “mercy killing,” Ó Briain’s speech (or, perhaps more importantly, the report about that speech in the paper) was guaranteed to attract a response from southern Irish Protestants.

Although the first to write in was Owen Sheehy Skeffington—who, as an atheist, qualifies as “Protestant” only by the most generous definition of the term—he was followed by others who reversed Ó Briain’s equation. Although the professors’ respondents approached the issue from a number of different perspectives, the overall message was clear: if Catholics criticized the liberal ethic, then non-Catholics would defend it. Echoing Sheehy Skeffington’s suggestion that in Ireland “a religion based on transcending love finds all too commonly its expression in uncharitable and misinformed attacks on any who dare to hold differing views,”2 Brian Inglis suggested that, by Ó Briain’s logic, “Protestantism must lead to Orangeism.”3 Hubert Butler, writing under his frequent pseudonym “Emilius,” pointed out that “Most Liberals, even Protestant ones, are ready to acknowledge the almost invaluable kindness, selflessness and goodness of the Catholic clergy in Ireland, but they cannot allow this claim to superior wisdom, which is so often and arrogantly made. Does not dogmatic assertion always provoke its opposite? Was not Stalin a theological student?” 4 A host of other contributors followed, and for six weeks the correspondence columns were packed with full-throated defenses of “liberalism,” broadly defined.

This was somewhat unusual for a group that could be as conservative as Irish society more broadly. Irish Catholics did not hold a monopoly on “respectability,” and some Protestants “actually welcome[ed] the puritanical trend in family law and the discipline of the press” in independent Ireland.5 It is true that Protestant faith leaders demonstrated a noted lack of enthusiasm for some of the more prominent attempts to legislate morality, such as the Committee on Evil Literature and the Censorship of Publications Board, and it is not unreasonable to infer disapproval from their silence.6 On the other hand, it is also possible that they feared that speaking out on these issues might offend not only the Catholic majority but also some of their own parishioners.

Read from the perspective of more than half a century on, what became known as the “Liberal Ethic” controversy—the Irish Times even produced its own pamphlet collecting the correspondence in June 1950—was actually a much more even-handed conversation than it may have appeared at the time.



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